Please help me out. The term-du-jour now seems to "neoliberal"

[Donald Ian Rankin]

42. It's a term the populist left use to conflate the establishment left and the establishment right.

I think that a very useful way to think about the Western politics of the last 8 or so years is on a 2-dimensional grid: left/right and establishment populist.

The US primaries illustrated the four quadrants beautifully: Clinton, Sanders, Rubio/Bush and Trump are classic examples of the four combinations.

8 years ago, things were roughly balanced between left and right; establishment was overwhelmingly dominant over populist.

Since then, populism has gotten a lot more competitive, but not attained parity; the left/right balance hasn't changed much, and the rise of populism has been left/right symmetrical.

In Europe, we've seen Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece, Podemos and New Citizens in Spain, the NF in France, a far-right populist nearly winning the Austrian presidential election, the Greens rising in Germany, and here in the UK the left/populist Jeremy Corbyn has taken over the Labour party, and the right/populist UKIP has surged massively. Brexit was a little bit about left/right, but mainly the leave vote was about populist anger against the establishment.

"Neoliberal" is a word the populist left uses to try to trick people into thinking that there's no difference between the establishment left and the establishment right; it's not actually a political philosophy people subscribe to, just a crude caricature with most of the important details rubbed out and drawn in intentionally wrongly.